1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a method and system for machine recognition of an image. More particularly, this invention relates to an apparatus, a method, a system and a computer readable medium for automatic recognition a human face and then an identification of the recognized face from a database of previously stored face data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Machine vision has many commercial applications and therefore, has attracted much attention in recent years. Many machine vision techniques and methods have been developed for detecting various image patterns and objects including deformable objects such as human faces. The ability to recognize a human face is an important machine vision problem. Face recognition applications are numerous, as well as diverse.
Face recognition applications can be used, for example, by security agencies, law enforcement agencies, the airline industry, the border patrol, the banking and securities industries and the like. Examples of potential applications include but are not limited to entry control to limited access areas, access to computer equipment, access to automatic teller terminals, identification of individuals and the like.
Present face recognition methods used in person identification systems, typically employ a face recognizer which determines the identity of a human face image. In order to identify the image, the system compares the face to other faces stored in a database. Systems used in many visual monitoring and surveillance incorporate a process whereby the system determines the position of the human eyes from an image or an image sequence containing the human face. Once the position of the eyes is determined, all of other important facial features, such as the position of the nose and the mouth, are determined by methods that (1) use correlation templates, (2) spatial image invariants, (3) view-based eigen spaces, etc. The use of one of these methods enables the system to recognize a face from a given face database, and can also be used to perform a variety of other related tasks.
One problem associated with conventional recognition techniques is somewhat inaccurate identification of the human face under analysis. In other words, the face is either misidentified or not identified at all. Moreover, some of these techniques require significant computation time to recognize and identify a face. The conventional solution to this problem has been accepting slow recognition time or using more power and therefore expensive computation equipment.